


No Alarms and No Surprises (Let Me Out of Here)

by nuclearmuffins



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Inquisitor (Dragon Age) Backstory, Just a lot of sadness, Pre-Canon, it'll get better!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 20:29:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19708846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuclearmuffins/pseuds/nuclearmuffins
Summary: Gen Cadash ruminates on the mess of his life just before he gets word of a new job.Originally written for a prompt on r/dragonage.





	No Alarms and No Surprises (Let Me Out of Here)

**Author's Note:**

> **Original prompt:** Darkness, the smell of stale whisky, and rot
> 
> Title taken from Radiohead - No Surprises.

Gen Cadash cursed under his breath as he fumbled with the flint and tinder in the dark, a string of “sod it”s and invocations of the Stone unusual for a surface dwarf streaming from his lips. Not for the first time, he wished he had a better solution to this.

Once, when he was six, maybe seven, his uncle had taken him to one of his deals - three crates of lyrium to the Ostwick Circle, a standard job. Only authorized Orzammar authorities were allowed to cart in the substance, after all, but sometimes the mages and the templars needed more than they could get legally.

That was where the Carta came in.

A little sleight of hand, a back or two turned by coin, and the Carta could get you whatever you needed. Delicate surface silks and lace for the wealthy of Orzammar, exotic foodstuffs normally blocked by layers of embargo, questionable crates transported wherever you wanted. And that included the glowing blue mineral everybody seemed to want to get their hands on, on the Surface. The Chantry needed it for their templars, the Circle for their mages, and the Carta were all too happy to fill in the gaps that the legal sales from Orzammar left behind.

He thought it had been horribly conspicuous of them to enter through the front door, something that definitely might have gotten them killed on any other job, but they had no choice. A Circle only ever had one entrance (to keep the mages from escaping, he’d later learned), so this was a deal unlike most he had already seen in his short years and the many others he would see in years to come.

It would also be the first time he ever saw magic.

The doors swung open to admit them, shutting back closed just as quickly to guide them into the darkness. Only the faint blue glow under their cloaks gave off any hint of light as they were ushered inside. Uncle Quinn had told him to stay put while he talked to the tall elven man who had let them in, but natural curiosity had carried him off elsewhere. Taking advantage of the barely-lit dark, he crept quietly. The voices somewhere down the hall drew him closer, wandering ever further.

Gen had always been small, always hard-to-find. He drew himself tighter, smaller, less noticable as he crept towards the source of the noise. And when he saw it…

Light streaming from a man’s fingertips, effortlessly flowing through the air in elegant figure-eights. Tendrils of flame hanging in mid-air in images waved by a massive staff. A whistle of wind, a hint of a biting chill appeared even as the heat crept in from the sweat-ridden summer outside as a woman twisted her hands through the air in complicated motion. He tried with his own hands, but nearly fell over onto the floor as he lost his balance, trying to twist his fingers into the strange formation the woman’s had been in. 

When he made his way back to his uncle (he always remembered the way back, _always_ ) he felt like his life had been forever changed. If his uncle had noticed the starry-eyed drift of his gaze, he said nothing, but after they’d gotten home that day, Gen had scoured his uncle’s shelves for anything, even just the thinnest tome on magic he could find. “Quinn the Quiet”, they called his uncle most days, since he’d much rather spend his time with dusty old books than the more classically dwarven activities of wheeling and dealing with their family’s various enemies. 

But Gen had understood his uncle. And Uncle Quinn had understood him. His uncle had let him take every last book out of his shelf, and when Gen had finished with everything on those shelves he’d gone out and gotten more for the both of them.

It wasn’t until later that he learned dwarves couldn’t become mages. Nobody had told him. Everyone assumed he’d known already - it was just a simple fact of being a dwarf that none of them would ever work magic nor feel the energies of the Fade. Such a simple fact: so ubiquitous, so obvious, yet how utterly it shattered his dreams. But he built new ones out of the pages, of far-off kingdoms he could only read and dream of. He could escape into the paragraphs, even as he got older and bit by bit every unsavoury facet of the “family business” had been revealed to him.

Uncle Quinn died when he was sixteen. Then there were no more books, no more words to escape into. Father had tossed all his volumes into the fire. And after he had screamed into the ashes his grandmother had carefully lifted his chin with one index finger, accentuated by a bright red talon, and calmly said to him, "It was for your own good, Eugenides. No more of these silly fantasies Quinn put into your head."

All that was left was the life he had been born into.

Finally, the fire roared before him. Gen lit a solitary torch, smothering the rest of the flames before they grew out of control.

The smell of burning from the lit torch in his hand only accentuated the scents already in the air - the slow decay and rot of flesh and years worth of vegetation, spilled whiskey from clumsy hands growing stale from time, moisture slicking the walls of the old smuggler's cave. He'd been here countless times, smelled that exact stench for years, yet every time he came here he still had the urge to wrinkle his nose. 

When he was a boy nobody had breathed a word about criminal activity. There had been no breaking of kneecaps, no cracking of fingers. Just quick and easy transactions, in and out before anybody knew they were there. Later, he would learn this is how they kept the family business afloat - teach the youngsters only the basics, no violence necessary. It was only when they were old enough they were taught the malevolence inherent in the gleam of a knife, how cutthroat their kind could really be to each other. By then it was too late for them.

He only wished he realized when he’d had the opportunity to get out. Now they had his body ensnared, but he’d kicked and screamed to keep his soul intact, to stay himself. He wondered how long he could keep it that way. Especially with what he had to do every single day of his life. 

He should have known to stop hoping that this job would be different than the rest, somehow. 

A desperate man huddled at the end of the winding tunnel. Another person begging, pleading for their life with him. Quiet threats uttered, thin knives threatening to slide into rib cages. Whimpering. Almost always whimpering. He hated that sound, hated it as a reminder of what he told himself he wouldn’t become, the promises to himself he broke. He told himself he had no other choice. He wondered how much that was true.

At least this time he hadn’t had to resort to any steel rods over shins, or the splintering of finger bones under his fist, he thought ruefully as he examined the fruits of his labour. The man had stolen two crates of satin intended for transport to Orzammar. He wished he could have told the man to just take it and run, to get away from this place as quickly as possible. But someone else, if not him, would have caught up with him eventually. Gen was trying to be kind. He didn’t know how much of it he had left in him, and better use it now before all of it shrivelled up and died.

His cousin Edric whistled as he watched him approach their usual table at the pub. He liked Edric better than most of the family, which, considering his usual reaction to them was a strong urge to spit in their faces, wasn't saying much. "How did the job go?" Edric nearly had to shout over the din of other pub patrons - loud enough so they shouldn’t be overheard, but Edric had never had a talent for subtlety.

Gen gave a shrug of indifference, grunting in response. He was too tired for witty retorts. Too much effort, and the satisfaction had been dwindling for some time now. 

Edric flashed him a smile as he passed Gen a tankard. “You’ve been quiet lately.”

The way the swill hit him like a punch to the gut made him want to gag, but he forced a good third of the contents of the tankard down before replying. “Tired. That’s all.”

Edric’s grin had turned lopsided. “Well, you might want to shore up your energy for the next job. Boss is sending us down south.”

A brief nod, then another grunt. “Where down south?”

“Ferelden, apparently. You heard of this whole business with the mages and the templars?”

Gen snorted. “No shit.” _Everyone_ had heard of it, but Edric was always a bit slow on the uptake. With how badly the conflict had affected the lyrium trade, legal or illegal, almost every dwarf had felt the impacts. “So he’s sending me down there.”

“Both of us. I’m coming with. He says it’s too important for just one man, so he’s sending two people.”

Gen swirled the contents of his tankard around, studying the murky liquid, trying to examine every bubble of foam that whirled around in the cup. Lately, he’d gone to lengths to keep his mind occupied at all times. Otherwise, it would go to places he fervently did not want it to go. It would go to _him_. It would go to the life they could have been building away from all of this nonsense if dwarven bullshit hadn’t butted its way in. “Okay. So did he tell you any details of this job that was so important?”

“Big event. They’re calling it the _Conclave_. He wants us to set out as soon as possible, get information.”

He’d heard bits of information from other Carta families sending their own spies to scour for information. House Cadash was sure to be no exception, and of course they would send him. “We should book passage to Ferelden as soon as possible, then. It’s a long ways away.”

Edric grinned, raising his own mug in a toast. “It’ll be just like old times. Us two, adventuring. Making our mark on the world. What do you say?”

_Adventure_ , or just another job slowly draining him away day by day. He couldn’t tell anymore.

“Adventure,” he pasted on the hints of a fake smile as he tapped his tankard against his cousin’s. “It’ll be an adventure, alright.”


End file.
